Main menu

The Neocons’ Waiting Game

October 9, 2012

Mitt Romney tried to burnish his foreign policy credentials with a speech lambasting pretty much everything President Obama has done. But the rhetoric may be less important than the neocons around Romney who hope to reclaim control of U.S. global affairs, says ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar.

By Paul R. Pillar

Many realities of foreign policy do not lend themselves to clear, coherent positions in an election campaign. The reasons for this go beyond the fact that in most election years far more votes are to be won or lost on domestic issues than foreign ones, even during better economic times than we have now.

One of the reasons is the reactive nature of much of foreign policy, in which presidents are forced to spend more of their attention dealing with problems the world throws at them than on imposing their own program on the world, however much they may have hoped to do such imposing when coming into office.

Even when a foreign-policy issue does figure significantly in an election campaign (Wilson kept us out of war in Europe; Eisenhower will get us out of war in Korea), it is usually a matter of dealing with a problem the world threw at the United States, such as a war someone else started.

It is often said that presidents have more autonomy in foreign than in domestic affairs, and that is true in the sense of having fewer energized domestic political forces to contend with. But having to deal with the problems of a big, unruly world that is even more outside the ability of a U.S. president to shape than are affairs inside U.S. borders means that despite that relative autonomy, there are no greater opportunities to impose an agenda or program in foreign affairs than in domestic ones.

The exceptional major cases of imposing such an agenda, either a successful one (Nixon’s triangular great-power diplomacy) or an unsuccessful one (the Iraq War) still did not figure into getting the relevant presidents elected. The possibility of launching a war in Iraq had no role in the 2000 campaign; the nuances of the diplomatic strategy Nixon brought into office were too sophisticated to influence many voters in 1968.

Appeals to candidates to sound more strategic and to lay out a foreign-policy strategy are common. But even for the foreign-policy intelligentsia, it may be difficult to distinguish in practice between policy that would be the product of sound strategy and policy that would be the result of what is simply good, skillful, pragmatic handling of the succession of unavoidable problems the world throws at us.

And when what purports to be strategy gets formulated in the lexicon of political campaigns, the line between strategy and sloganeering can get very thin. Most of the tradeoffs and complexities that need to be addressed by a good foreign policy are beyond the comprehension or at least the cognizance of the great majority of voters. There are tradeoffs and complexities in domestic policy too, of course, but more of them are ones (e.g., more spending on Medicare means more strain on the federal finances) that much of the electorate can relate to.

We see some of these realities playing out in the fight for Mitt Romney’s foreign-policy ear, with some of the most ardent fighters being on the largely neocon Right. Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute, in a piece titled “Romney’s Missing Foreign Policy,” lays into the Republican nominee pretty strongly with the “we need a strategy” theme.

Setting aside whether Pletka’s own recommendations ever really get beyond sloganeering and offer any meat, the speech that Romney delivered on Columbus Day at the Virginia Military Institute should have left any meat eaters hungry. Romney talks about strategy, too, and perhaps the most laudable line in the speech is that the use of drones is “no substitute for a national security strategy in the Middle East.” Quite so.

But the most one can extract from the speech about Romney’s own strategy is that if one proclaims often enough and loudly enough that America is great, that it is exceptional, that it is a leader and that others in the world want our leadership, somehow those bedeviling problems in the Middle East and elsewhere will get solved.

Much of what the candidate said runs up against that reality of how a U.S. president, even if he enjoys autonomy from domestic political constraints, cannot snap his fingers and thereby make things happen overseas. A major element of Romney’s “strategy” seems to be the belief that simply by expressing a desire or objective firmly enough, it will be attained, never mind whatever obstacles have kept it from being attained and what U.S. interests may be at stake with those obstacles.

This was the case with what he said, for example, about free-trade agreements and also with his criticism of the president for an “abrupt withdrawal” of U.S. troops from Iraq without mentioning that the hang-up in extending the withdrawal deadline that the Bush administration negotiated (even if such an extension would have done anyone any good) concerned the need to guarantee immunity for U.S. personnel from prosecution in Iraqi courts.

One can be confident that if the Obama administration had extended the troop presence without such a guarantee and even a single U.S. soldier had wound up in an Iraqi court, this would have been a major point of attack in Romney’s speech.

The most prominent feature of the speech is that on most issues, including Afghanistan, Syria and sanctions on Iran, Romney’s words were mostly a description of current policy. There is nothing wrong with that. It is a tacit recognition of the reality about the United States having only a limited range of action without endangering its own interests.

To the extent one tries to extrapolate any differences from current policy, such as inferring the consequences of maintaining no “daylight” between the United States and the prime minister of Israel, as Romney says he intends to do, then the consequences really would endanger U.S. interests.

To the extent Romney’s refraining from spelling out the implied policies suggests not duplicity but instead the prospect that if elected he would not actually adopt such policies, then good for him. Let Danielle Pletka and other meat-eating critics remain unsatisfied.

To be sure, there is plenty in this speech that the candidate should not be allowed to get away with. Perhaps most fundamental is the whole notion that upheaval and instability in the Middle East is the fault of the president of the United States.

The assertion that “the risk of conflict in the region is higher now than when the president took office” is a strange campaign point, given that President Obama ended U.S. involvement in the one war in the Middle East in which it was still fighting and given that the person most likely to start a new war in the region damaging to U.S. interests is Romney’s friend and backer, the “no-daylight” Israeli prime minister.

The candidate’s reference to “President Obama’s deep and arbitrary cuts to our national defense” ignores the fact that the only such deep and arbitrary cuts in store are those in the sequestration agreement, which was part of a bipartisan way of trying to overcome the impasse created when Congressional members of Romney’s party attempted extortion by threatening to make the nation default on its debt.

And Governor Romney really needs to get past trying to exploit the deaths of U.S. officials in Libya in suggesting that the natural development of the analysis and investigation of the incident was instead some kind of withholding of an honest explanation by the Obama administration. This exploitation is especially rich given that Romney’s own initial statement on the subject was a falsehood that described as the administration’s “initial response” to the lethal incident an embassy statement that was released before the incident had even occurred.

But as for the lack of a meat-on-the-bones strategy that distinguishes Mr. Romney from his opponent, let us go easy on Romney. That lack is not a failing of the candidate so much as it reflects an immutable reality of foreign policy.

This election will make a difference in foreign policy but not primarily in ways that are clearly discernible in this speech. We ought to pay more attention to those who will have Romney’s ear not just now but if he were the president. Conspicuous among them are the neocons who never seem to go away.

Paul R. Pillar, in his 28 years at the Central Intelligence Agency, rose to be one of the agency’s top analysts. He is now a visiting professor at Georgetown University for security studies. (This article first appeared as a blog post at The National Interest’s Web site. Reprinted with author’s permission.)

Post navigation

6 comments for “The Neocons’ Waiting Game”

I’ve got an idea…how ’bout…if Romney gets elected, we give him the Nobel Peace Prize, and…and…maybe he’ll live up to it! Yeah…that’s the ticket!

paschn

October 9, 2012 at 11:22 pm

ROFLMO!

Kenny Fowler

October 9, 2012 at 7:38 pm

The Neocons are always lurking like a pack of hyaenas on the Kalahari plain. They know that when Obama wins they will remain marginalized for the next four years. But make no mistake they’ll still be around, lurking. With beady eyes and grunting.

Nelson Dalton

October 10, 2012 at 3:53 am

Let`s be very clear about one thing for certain > the NeoCon NaziZionist have made the same decision the Nazi`s of old Germany have made some 70 years ago . . . Win an Election by telling BIG – Lies and old fashioned Scaremongering – just as has their chosen â€œFuhrer Romney” has done – always repeating a Lie a thousand times over and over,hoping and betting that those repeated Lies will eventually be believed by those very same people they`re trying to fool.
And just as Hitler and Goebbels were promising â€œButter and Cannonsâ€œ to the defeated Germans to rectify the wrongs of the outcome of WWI – Romney/Hitler and Ryan/Goebbels have been promising something similar of late. But as the recent Presidential debate has shown Romney`s-Butter for the masses are fictitious,muddled Numbers that don`t end up, while the benefits for the richest 1% and the need for more Cannons – speak the Military Industrial Complex – are a big part of Hitler/Romney`s envisioned budget policy – just as it was with the old Nazi`s of yesterday.

What bold-faced Liar Romney did not tell or elude to,is that the lower 99% will have to do the fighting and the dying,while the upper 1% – including Romney and Ryan – would fully enjoy the guarantied Benefits of such an appalling and deceiving plan.

It is about time that the American people realize those Realities that the Republican party and Romney have up their sleeves. One should also being reminded of the infamous Video showing Romney revealing his true feelings and intentions toward the American working middle class – in which he expressed his total rejection for the 47% â€œ who do not count and he does not care about â€œ Americans – when they are going to vote in this upcoming presidential Election.
There has never been a clearer choice for Americans to vote for this time around and > that obvious choice is still President Barack Obama.

Stephen J. Sniegoski Ph.D, author of 2003 book â€˜The War on Iraq: Conceived in Israelâ€˜ wrote about Obama, Iran and Israel Lobby in July 2012: â€œPresident Obama will continue his policy of â€œdrift toward war with Iran,â€ at least until after the November election. Should he be re-elected, perhaps he would change in his second term, but he still must consider the effect such a move would have on the political success of his second term, his legacy, and, as a relatively young man, his career after the presidency, all of which could be seriously jeopardized by his taking positions that run afoul of the Israel Lobbyâ€œ.

US Col. Larry Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Gen. Colin Powell â€“ however believes that after his meetings with Iranian leaders, itâ€™s clear that under Israel Lobby grip, the US has lost the ability to understand how other states see their interests. Watch the video below.

MITTNUTS
My first act will be to defund Planned Parenthood. Darn. They prevent more abortions than any unit in America. Mitt loves abortions? PP provides preventative health care for millions of the poorest of poor women. Do not Mormons worship Jesus Christ?

My first act will be to repeal Obamacare. Darn. I thought it is a law of the land passed by Congress.
Mitt now a dictator who can do as he pleases.

My Five Trillion Tax Cut will not add to the deficit. I will pay for it by eliminating tax break loopholes for my rich backers. Sho nuff!